Tag: love story

An exceptionally tall girl in an orange dress with a piece of red-velvet cake on a plate and a lanky New Zealander with a video camera meet on the subway headed for Coney Island. They chat. They separate. They meet again. Could it be fate? Could it be the romance of both their lives? So begins the premise of Love Story, which is part Rom-Com, part art-experiment, part documentary. The woman is Masha, a Russian beauty who Kiwi filmmaker Florian Habicht hired to be his girlfriend for the making of the film. Their meeting is staged, as is Florian’s quest to find her afterwards. He solicits on-the-street advice from a charming rouges gallery of New Yorkers on how to proceed with his relationship-slash-film with the girl, including at one point climbing right into a taxicab occupied by a lady stock-broker to ask for seduction advice for a possible sex-scene (more on that in a moment.) In one of many fourth wall breaks, you not only get the seduction advice (“play the shy card”) but you also see the stock broker sign the documentary release form from a stack that Habicth carries around. If nothing else, it shows the power of a man and a movie camera and a built in conversation in a city of extroverts – and that even the most guerrilla of filmmaking projects still has a lot of paper work.

It is startlingly clear that the writers of Dark City were admirers of cult science fiction author, Philip K. Dick. And the film adaptation of yet another one of his stories looks like a much more contemporary (read: less expressionistic set design) version of the same story. Sure the love story and overall ‘peel pack the curtain of paranoia’ are quite familiar at this point (as is the borrowed score in this trailer, is it from the end of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine? Yes.) but hey, science fiction for adults is always a good thing. Bonus: The film has a top-shelf cast including Emily Blunt and Matt Damon (two much loved actors in these parts,) the too-damn-awesome-for-his-own-good Terence Stamp, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Mad Men’s John Slattery. First time director George Nolfi (who apparently only co-writes Matt Damon movies judging by his IMDb page) is the man in charge.

I knew that at some point we’d posted a trailer for the anthology film New York, I Love You what I didn’t realize was that that trailer was posted a year ago.

The film premiered at TIFF last year and Kurt foresaw the film would open early in 2009 but for some reason, reviews perhaps?, it was shelved and forgotten until today when a sexy discombobulated new trailer appeared. With acting and directing contributions from a long list of talented folk (Park Chan-Wook, The Hughes Brothers, Faith Akin, Mira Nair, Yvan Attal, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, Joshua Marston, Andrei Zvyanginstev, Brett Ratner, Shia LeBeouf, Blake Lively, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Anton Yelchin, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Chris Cooper, Kevin Bacon, Robin Wright Penn, Maggie Q, Ethan Hawke, John Hurt, Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Olivia Thirlby) this is bound to have a little something for everyone.

The trailer is not exactly eye popping but it certainly looks nice and I have love for much of the talent involved so I’m game. I still haven’t seen Paris, je t’aime but I may have to check it out before being sucked into this one.

New York, I Love You is scheduled for limited release on October 16th.